Are We on the Cusp of a New Political Order?

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2024

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our politics are increasingly divided on fundamental issues like the legitimacy of elections and the nature and integrity of the basic systems of American government. That’s the most important fact of this election. But strange new zones of agreement have been emerging, too — on China, outsourcing and health care. What should we make of that? In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” the historian Gary Gerstle describes these shifts in consensus in terms of political orders — these eras that stretch for decades, when both parties come to accept a certain set of ideas. In this conversation he walks me through the political, economic and social factors that shaped two political orders in the last century: the New Deal order and the neoliberal order. And we apply this lens to what’s happening in our politics right now. It may seem strange to take a step back in time right before the election. But I think Gerstle’s framework helps uncover an overlooked dimension of the 2024 race and where politics might go next. Book Recommendations: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta Underground Asia by Tim Harper The Known Citizen by Sarah E. Igo Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our supervising editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Michelle Harris and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times opinion, this is January of 2020, way before the election actually took place before COVID, for that matter.
0:31.0	I published a whole book about political polarization. It was called Why We're Polarized.
0:36.2	And I've been thinking a lot about how the polarization
0:39.4	of this year is different than what I was tracking when I was writing that book. I mean,
0:45.2	the divisions are much more fundamental. When I was writing that book, so much of the arguments
0:50.6	were about Obamacare and taxes. And now the fight is over the very legitimacy
0:56.0	of elections, the going after enemies using the power of the federal government, the nature
1:02.6	and integrity of the basic systems of American government. I think that is the most important
1:09.1	fact of politics right now. It has been the subject of many,
1:11.8	many of our episodes this year. But it is interesting, I think, that the policy issues on which
1:19.1	there once seemed so little room for compromise are now so much more open. From free trade to
1:26.0	antitrust, from healthcare to outsourcing, from China to unions,
1:30.8	there is suddenly a lot more overlap in at least the rhetoric of the two parties. Not always a policy,
1:37.6	but the rhetoric. And sometimes the overlap really is substantive. The Trump administration,
1:42.4	it really was a break with the Obama administration
1:44.7	on China. But the Biden administration was not a reversion back to where Obama was. The Biden
1:51.2	administration, they took what Trump did on China, and they went a lot further. What does that tell us?
1:59.0	In his book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the historian Gary Girstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century. The New Deal Order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order,
2:19.8	which stretched from the 70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling
2:26.5	politics right now is that we're in a moment between orders, a moment where you can just begin to
2:32.9	see the hazy outline of something new taking shape.
2:36.2	And both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves to grasp at it and respond to it.
	...

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